IGN: Hannibal: How Bryan Fuller Approached the Iconic Character by Eric Goldman

IGN TV: Hannibal Lecter
is obviously this beloved character, and there have been great movies
about him in the past. But when you’re offered something like this, I’d
imagine there might be some trepidation too, just because it comes with
so much baggage and expectations.

Bryan Fuller: You know, it wasn’t so much
trepidation as it was just excitement of the missing chapter, for me,
and of when he was a practicing psychiatrist and a practicing cannibal.
We had never seen that story. We had seen the prequel Hannibal Rising,
when he was a young man around World War II, and certainly
post-incarceration. But the unexplored chapter of the Hannibal Lecter
story that doesn’t exist in literature or film or on television is when
he was a practicing psychiatrist and cannibal. I thought that was a
validity in and of itself, to bring this character back. I’m sure a lot
of people were like, “Ugh, leave it alone.” But we ended on Hannibal
Rising, which I wasn’t a huge fan of, and I wanted to get back into the
heart of the character in a way that I saw him. I was never really
connected to the Hannibal Rising version of the character because he was
such a young man that I think who Hannibal Lecter is as a sophisticate
and a man of the world just does not translate when you’re seeing a
young man murderer. He seems more of a punk than someone who is well
aware of life and stakes.

IGN: Of course, casting is always key, but here your main
three characters have been played by multiple actors. And Hopkins’
especially was such an iconic performance. What was it you were looking
for, and what was it you found with Mads to play this role?

Fuller: I think the key was we had to put up an
orange cone where Anthony Hopkins had tread, as well as Brian Cox,
because I think Brian Cox’s performance [in Manhunter]
is as iconic as Anthony Hopkins. There’s much debate and hardcore
Lecter-verse fans of who was the superior Hannibal Lecter, and for me
both were excellent. I refuse to choose a favorite. Obviously Anthony
Hopkins won the Academy Award, and Silence of the Lambs was a
spectacular film, so he’s got more audience real estate than Brian Cox.
But if we’re talking about performances, they’re both excellent
performances. So we just wanted to make sure we weren’t going in either
of those directions.
What I love about Mads and Mads’ approach is that when we first sat
down -- first of all, he’s so charismatic, and he is so excited about
what he does and his meticulous approach to crafting a character that I
just knew was in great hands of a fantastic performer. But also, one of
the things that we talked about in our first meeting was not so much
about playing Hannibal as the cannibal psychiatrist, as previously
portrayed by other actors, but more like Lucifer and how he was a dark
angel who had this affinity for mankind and a fascination with the human
condition. But he also recognized when people were not respectful of
their rules or place in society and were rude, and felt that they
deserved to have those places revoked. So if you’re a pig of human
being, you deserve to be Hannibal Lecter’s bacon. There was a simplicity
to looking at the role, particularly Mads’ portrayal of the role
through the lens of “this is a devil at work here.” And it kind of gives
him a greater mythology -- not that we have to tap into any sort of
Judeo-Christian context at all -- but if you just watch the show and
think that this is a devil at work and not a man there is a consistency
with Mads’ performance, particularly when he gets very emotionally
involved. Because Hannibal Lecter is unique in his crazy. He’s not a
psychopath, because he experiences regret. And he not a sociopath,
because he experiences empathy. So he is unique in his crazy, and that
gives him a higher sensibility than just a mortal man.

IGN: I’m very intrigued by the portrayal of Will Graham,
another person who’s been played by a couple of great actors in the
past. Here, obviously a big difference between previous versions is that
we are seeing much more of Will’s career before anything happens with
actually catching Hannibal. In Red Dragon,
he's married, but here, he’s very much a loner. You’ve got this very
intriguing thing where he talks about where he is "on the spectrum" and
the fact that he really has some problems with interpersonal
relationships. How did that come to you?

Fuller: Well, we were looking at our timeline and
saying, “Season 4 is Red Dragon”, so where Will is psychologically in
terms of his confidence and approach to solving these crimes? We would
see Molly in Season 3, and that’s when we would introduce that
character. Also, how Will Graham got to be in a relationship based on
his idiosyncrasies, that would be part of the story that we’re telling
with him, as going from a man who is on the outside looking in at the
human condition -- because he is so vulnerable and sensitive to other
people that he has to protect himself from that. There are a couple of
things in the book that were indicative of certain personality disorders
or neuroses that I thought, “Oh, he’s actually much more complicated
than any of the kind of stoic heroes that we’ve seen portrayed by
William Peterson and Ed Norton.” So it felt like there was, like with
Hannibal, an opportunity to explore a chapter in Will Graham’s life that
we hadn’t seen, but was indicated in the literature, whether it was
when he’s talking to a police detective or Molly’s son about how he
caught the Minnesota Shrike or Hannibal Lecter.
There was a very thin history that we could work within, which was we
knew that Will Graham was investigating a serial killer called the
Minnesota Shrike and after catching him was so traumatized by that event
that he had to go into psychiatric care. Instead of positing that he
was just with a random psychiatrist, the break in the canon of the
literature that we took was that that psychiatrist would be Hannibal
Lecter. Because he doesn’t really know Hannibal Lecter in the
literature. He had two meetings with him. One was to question him about a
murder, and the second was a follow up. Then in that follow up he
realized, “This guy’s the killer,” and then Hannibal guts him with a
carpet knife, and Will captures him. So that was the extent of their
relationship. What I thought, there was so much promise in the line
where Hannibal says, “You caught me because you’re more like me than
you’re willing to admit.” I thought that was the heart of the television
series.

GN: It’s a really cool visual effect, but the wipes across
the screen that we see as sort of a “Will vision”, what do you call
those and where did that idea come from?Fuller: [Laughs] We call them a couple of things. We
call them the “flim-flum,” which is just the sound of the pendulum, but
it’s a pendulum that -- there’s a line in Red Dragon when Will Graham goes to look at the crime scene. Thomas Harris
has a line about how “In his mind a pendulum swings through the
darkness.” It’s this kind of method of self-hypnosis, so he can get
himself in the mindset of these horrible human beings. It is a version
of hypnosis, but it’s also this kind of psychological time travel to the
time and place that these events occurred, but before they occurred so
he can piece them together from the perspective of the killer and
actually walk in that person’s shoes and commit the crimes that they
did. So we really understand how truly horrible it is for him to do what
he does. He’s not just looking at clues, he’s actually taking the
purple cloak of these horrible human beings’ minds and wrapping them
around him.

IGN: Jack Crawford has a very interesting role in this story, especially because he kind of ends up using Hannibal as a sounding board, a confidant, as well. So will it be interesting to track both Jack and Will’s relationships with Hannibal, and will they differ dramatically?

Fuller: Oh yeah, there are big, big differences.
It’s interesting to me to read different perspectives on how we’re going
to approach the show. We go from the pilot to episode 13, which is such
a dramatic arc, and it really kicks up around the last third of the
season where the stakes of the story become dramatically richer and
greater than what you thought they were at the beginning of the show. I
think we cover a lot more real estate in those 13 episodes than people
are expecting us to, and I’m looking forward to seeing how surprised
people are. What they’re expecting us to do and what we actually do I
think are going to be two different things.

IGN: There were some expectations early on when we heard the
concept. “Okay, so it’s Will and Hannibal, and they’re sort of working
together on cases each week,” which to some extent is occurring. But
having seen the first five episode, there’s much more of a through line
from the first case and the first episode and characters continuing from
that. Was that sort of an interesting balance for you, to how much you
put in the new killers and how much you continue that specific plot line
set up in the first episode?

Fuller: For me, the “killer of the week” or “case of
the week” had to have some psychological connection to what Will Graham
was experiencing. There was an importance of not just being a case that
you would see on a traditional crime procedural that involved rape and
murder, because we have a brand that we’re honoring with what Thomas
Harris has crafted in his own unique genre. So there was a devotion to
the purple opera that exists with the characters and the types of
killers that are presented in the Thomas Harris books that you see --
not only Hannibal Lecter,
who is the cannibal psychiatrist, which right off the bat is a
heightened, fascinating point of view of a killer, someone who can get
inside your head and start consuming what he finds there -- but you have
the Red Dragon, who is a man who feels like he is evolving into a super
being because of his inability to deal with his own mortality and the
finite nature of his life. You also have Buffalo Bill, who is a man who
wants to become a woman, so he is making a woman suit out of real women
that he can put on and achieve his own transformation of self. So
there’s a great psychological component to all of the murderers that
we’ve seen in the Thomas Harris literature that I felt a responsibility
to tell stories in that same approach, that we needed an element of
purple opera.

IGN: The previous shows that you created and were integral on
always had a strong sense of humor and a witty tone to them. Certainly
this, on the surface and the overall subject matter, seems darker. But
was it interesting for you to find those places where you could still
insert wit -- Hannibal himself has always been a character with a sense
of humor – and find those moments where there could be some levity
amongst the darkness?

Fuller: Absolutely. I think there is an element of
this show that functions as a very, very dark comedy. When you have a
serial killer whose approach is to eat the rude and refers to his
victims as “free-range rude,” there is an inherent wit to that that was
delicious. Hugh and I, we talked a lot about Will Graham’s psychology,
and I would often walk him through where we’re going with the show and
what’s happening and what’s coming up, so he knew where he needed to be
on his arc. We would cackle like fiends when talking about certain
things that happened in upcoming episodes, because they were so horrible
and heightened in their own way that they didn’t necessarily read as
true crime, but as a kind of amplification of reality and what you could
actually do to a body and why you would do it. So we had a giddy glee
at some of the horrible places that we were going. But when you put it
into the tone of the show and you translate it into the horror
vocabulary, it’s obviously not as laugh-out-loud funny. [Laughs] But if
you break it down and say, “Oh, there’s a guy who’s actually making
catgut strings out of people,” and it’s kind of snicker inducing. But in
the context of that episode, it’s dark and scary, and the guy is a
villain. But yeah, talking about it, it was easier to find the humor
than actually seeing it, which I think is what we should do because we
want to be true to the tone of the books, which was not heavy-handed in
its humor at all, but there was definitely a dark humor at work.

IGN: Speaking of content, when this show was announced, there
were people saying, “How can this work on network? This should
obviously be on cable. It’ll feel softened on a network.” Having seen
those five episodes, it doesn’t feel softened to me, but what were your
conversations like with the network and how did you walk that line? What
was the line?

Fuller: Well the line was really what was appropriate for the brand, and we are dealing with a brand. Hannibal Lecter
is a franchise character, so we had to be respectful of honoring the
genre in which this character lives. The early conversation with NBC
was, “Will you let us tell the story the way it needs to be told?” And
the answer was “Yes.” We talked about content, we talked about gore.
Having worked on Heroes that first season, we went to some very gory
place. We had Hayden Panettiere on an autopsy table flayed open right
down the middle, and you saw the skinned meat of her breasts as she
folded the flaps back over the open wound, and they healed. It was
pretty gory! So I knew that we could go places, and I knew that
television had evolved and needed to continue to evolve. We are a ten
o’clock show, and we are an adult content show, and we are a horror
movie. So we needed to have all those elements of a horror movie, and
they were very supportive that we would go there. And there were certain
things we weren’t allowed to do, but they weren’t unreasonable things. I
found in doing -- because I was very excited about it -- we had to do
the “Unsuitable for Broadcast Television” version of the show, where we
got to show everything that we shot in its true-gore glory. There were
over half of the episodes where there’s nothing more to put in them,
because we had already shown it all.

IGN: What is the place intended for those versions?

Fuller: You know, it would either be on the DVD or
some secondary market. I think that we should absolutely have the
“Unsuitable for Broadcast Television” version of certain episodes, where
you get to see a bit more -- for me, the main reason for showing those
is that there’s great work and craftsmanship on display with our
prosthetics team. As somebody who read Tom Savini’s Grand Illusions in
seventh grade -- I have pictures of myself with all sorts of bloody gore
effects from my childhood that kind of made the photo-processing place
very nervous whenever I came to drop off film. So I always appreciate
those things as a craft and going, “Oh my God, it looks amazing! Look at
your detail and the brilliance of your work.” That’s sort of what I see
first, a half-step ahead of the story, because I am an appreciator of
fine makeup effects work. There are a couple of things that we didn’t do
on the show. There’s a couple of places where I’m like, “Oh, they’ll
never let us show that.” It always becomes a conversation of what we can
show, what we can’t show, how much of what we can show. But I would say
for the bulk of the episodes, we showed everything that we shot.
There’s a little less than half of the episodes where there’s some
pretty extreme stuff that we couldn’t show. But certainly nothing that… I
feel like NBC was probably more lenient than the MPAA.

IGN: A big topic of conversation in January at the TCA
[Television Critics Association] press tour was the whole violence on TV
issue. I grew up a huge horror fan, and I agree with you as far as I
love seeing that stuff and appreciating the craftsmanship and the fun of
it. So where do you stand when this question comes up and people are
saying, “Are you worried about this content and the influence of this
content?” What do you feel about that?

Fuller: Well, I think we have a responsibility to
the genre and the genre audience first. That’s where I feel my
responsibility is as a member of that audience and somebody who has a
voice in defending its merits. I take my role very seriously. I asked
this to David Slade. We were in lockstep on our approach to the horror
on this show, and we’re both horror fans, we both love the genre. We
both feel we’re respecting the genre with the work that we’re doing, and
we take that very seriously, because I don’t want to see a domesticated
Hannibal. It’s the difference between a bear and a circus bear. I want to see the bear.

IGN: We have a sort of zeitgeist moment with The Following and Bates Motel and Hannibal
all launching so close together. What do you think it is - just one of
those things that happened where a bunch of people are working in a
similar realm at the same time?

Fuller: I think it’s really about sentimentality,
and we are sentimental creatures. We have these things from our
childhoods or impressionable ages that had an impact on us. I remember
in seventh or eighth grade going to a friend’s house, and I was obsessed
with Friday the 13th and Halloween and The Fog and Black Christmas and
all of those stock-and-flash staples of the genre. A friend of mine’s
mom was like, “You have to read Robert Bloch, not just see Psycho, but
you have to read the book and see the movie and become a student of the
genre.” Because, yes, there is something very effective about horror
movies. I do feel that horror as a genre is very operatic. Those
stock-and-flash films of the ‘70s and ‘80s, which had a greater care in
the approach to characters than what we have now, more consistently --
for me, you look at the original Friday the 13th -- which I think is a
great film, and I think Friday the 13th Part 2 is a great film -- but if
you compare it to the remake of Friday the 13th, the component that is
missing for me is that in the original, those are all likable teenagers.
They’re working at a summer camp for kids, and they care about the
children. They have an intrinsic likability to them. In the remake,
they’re all assholes and idiots. You’re just waiting for them to die.
It’s just so kind of contemptuous of the characters. I thought they were
missing the point of horror, which is, you don’t want to desensitize
the audience to the experience. You want them to care about the person
who dies. You don’t want them to see them as disposable byproducts. You
want them to feel like there’s a loss of life there, which is increasing
the effect of the horror. So really it does have an operatic quality,
but instead of consumption killing off the young lovers, it’s Mrs.
Voorhees or Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger. So I
think that... I’ve gone off on a tangent of horror, so you might have to
pull me back to answer the question. [Laughs]

IGN: Just that you’ve got this, Bates Motel, The Following
launching pretty close together – So do you think, yeah, it’s just a
bunch of people at the same time saying, “This is the kind of stuff I
grew up loving, and I want to explore these things again”?

Fuller: Yeah, and I actually know Kevin Williamson
and love his work and love him as a human being. We were at a party, and
he was like, “What are you working on?” I was like, “I’m doing Hannibal Lecter,” and he was like, “Oh! I’m doing Hannibal Lecter! I’m doing my own version of Hannibal Lecter.” So it was kind of funny that we were both greatly inspired by Thomas Harris
and the world that he created. And yet Kevin was going off and doing an
original take on the dynamics of the story and the characters and the
villain. I was able to go back to the source, but we were both
absolutely inspired by Thomas Harris in a way that is a lot of fun and
kind of shows two different writers approaching the same material from
two completely different perspectives, both of them valid. It’s kind of
an interesting side-by-side comparison because both shows are very
Thomas Harris-ian.

IGN: You mentioned the fourth season being the Red Dragon story. Do you think it’ll be 13 episodes a year? How do you see the whole thing going?

Fuller: Well, it’s absolutely 13 episodes a season.
For me, Red Dragon is Season 4, and splitting the time over Season 5 and
Season 6 would be the era of Silence of the Lambs -- we don’t have the
rights to any of the characters that originate in Silence of the Lambs,
but that’s not to say that Clarice Starling
was the only trainee that Jack Crawford ever sent to interview a serial
killer. You’ve seen the fifth episode, so you know that he’s done it
before. So my dream is that -- because MGM has the rights to any
character that originated in Silence of the Lambs, and we have the
rights to any character that originated in Red Dragon or Hannibal or Hannibal Rising.
We actually approached MGM because I desperately wanted to tell the
story of how that head ended up in a jar in Silence of the Lambs. So we
approached MGM -- who can’t use Hannibal Lecter in their Clarice
Starling show -- and said, “If we let you have letters from Hannibal
Lecter and have a relationship… You don’t necessarily see him on screen,
but you can actually acknowledge the history of Clarice Starling. What
if we got the rights to Benjamin Raspail and Jame Gumb/Buffalo Bill.
That way, we could be telling the definitive Hannibal Lecter stories and
acknowledge his existence in both shows.” They were like, “No, what’s
ours is ours, and what’s yours is yours.” Then we said, “Pretty please?”
And they said, “No, what’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is yours.” So
we said, “Can we sit down face-to-face and talk about this?” We did,
and they said, “What’s ours is ours, and what’s yours is yours.”
[Laughs] So they were very definitive about where they stood. So what we
did in the arc that we had for Benjamin Raspail and Jame Gumb in the
first season, we did a different story about a patient of Hannibal
Lecter’s who had ties to a serial killer in a unique way. Instead of
Benjamin Raspail, we did Franklin Froideveaux -- Benjamin Franklin and
then Froideveaux is a street that runs parallel to Raspail in Paris. So
we were acknowledging in some way that’s the role that we were filling
in this season, with those characters and that story you’re going to
see.

IGN: Knock on wood, this show continues into future seasons.
Are you hoping that maybe they’ll change their mind and something can be
worked out?

Fuller: Absolutely. I hope they look at the show and
say, “Oh, this is really cool, and it’s a classy approach to the
material, and we want to be associated with it,” and that maybe they
will change their minds. But they sold the rights to a Clarice Starling
story to Lifetime, and it’s been in development for a few years. It’s
turned around and then redeveloped and turned around and redeveloped.
I’m sticking pins in a voodoo doll of that show and hoping that it just
goes away so they can see that, really, this is the best thing for the
audience… Which is always my approach to these things, because I do feel
my place in the audience, and as somebody who’s been given a the
opportunity to have a voice in how things can proceed, I do have a
responsibility, very heavily. So I, as an audience member, want Clarice
Starling to be tied into Hannibal Lecter and see one definitive source
for the Hannibal Lecter story, which would be this show. But time will
tell. Maybe we’ll launch a letter-writing campaign to MGM!

3 comments:

Wow that's a lot of info. So will S3 take place in the 2-3 years between Lecter's incarceration and 'Red Dragon'? Are we gonna see the trial and Will's recovery? This is the season I'm most unsure of, because what are you going to do with Lecter? Will won't be investigating anything, what will he be doing?

I hope when they end Will's storyline in S4, they end it closer to the movies than the books- if Will ends up disfigured, without his family and a drunk... he might as well put a bullet in his head, cause he deserves a better ending than that.

Interesting about Silence being two seasons. I haven't read the book- is there enough to stretch it over 2 seasons?

Will S7 be 'Hannibal'? I really hope they don't go with the book ending for Hannibal (I seem anti book endings, LOL) because it seems like fan fiction. Him trying to make her into his little sister I can buy, but her deciding to be with him and running off to Argentina? WTF?

I hope they get rights to characters from Silence. Maybe if S1 is a hit, fans can pressure MGM enough and we can have Clarice and Buffalo Bill and everyone else.

Maybe Season 3 could be the trial with flashbacks and evidence presented about some of Hannibal's kills and his backstory?

After Season 4 maybe Will isn't disfigured and a drunk at all, maybe he's gone undercover and that's just a cover story?

Seasons 5 and 6 - I don't think Silence of the Lambs will be covered in those two seasons as much as the fact that those seasons will take place in that setting in time. Since the character of Clarice Starling may not be appearing it is likely that those seasons won't follow Silence of the Lambs too closely. Also unlikely Season 7 will be "Hannibal" without Clarice, could be Will recovering and finding Hannibal in Argentina?

I think S3 being the trial makes sense- it would be a way to have Will, Hannibal and Crawford there. Will needs to physically recover, so there's probably a little time jump. We know he already met Molly during the trial, cause Hannibal commented on his aftershave being the same one from the trial. (he keeps getting it for Xmas). I'm still not sure if there's enough there for 13 episodes, but I'm willing to give Bryan Fuller the benefit of the doubt.

You think they might completely forgo Will's ending and him retiring for good? I kinda hope he does retire. It would be interesting to see if Hannibal tries contacting him after the events of 'Red Dragon', considering he's maybe mentioned 3 times in 'Silence' but that's it for him. I hope to God he's not disfigured. If he can keep his family, I'd prefer it, but please don't disfigure him.

Who knows what will happen in 4 years (around the time of S5), they might get the rights to use Clarice. I hope they do, even though I'm sure there are those hoping they don't cover 'Silence' and tread on holy ground. If they do get Clarice, S7 is supposedly the last, so I can see them doing 'Hannibal' as the ending of the saga.

I hope Will stays clear of Doctor Lecter. If Lecter wants to call/visit (though I hope not have him for dinner) then that's fine, but I honestly can't see Will wanting to go after Lecter, after everything that will happen by that point. No way would Crawford convince him this time.